Last night, at around 8:10 pm, a little girl of maybe 9 walked out onto the stage of the house that Carnegie built, her mother standing in the wings, watchng. When she got to the mic, she introduced herself: "My name is Harley Quinn Smith. My dad wanted me to say some curse words, but instead, I'll leave it to the master." And for the next three hours, Kevin Smith held court in Carnegie Hall.
If you've never been to one of the hundreds of Q&As Smith has done around the world — or seen any of the Evening With Kevin Smith DVDs — the format is simple: The writer-director gets on stage, does about 20 minutes of warm-up, and then fields questions from the audience. And the stories that get woven into the answers are what draws people to these Q&As by the thousands (the Carnegie Hall show was sold out). Smith is a born raconteur, able to spin the barest of questions (like, "Will you ever act again?") into 30-minute seminars on how his Catch and Release costar Jennifer Garner has the sense of humor of C-3PO ("Goodness gracious me!") despite being married to Ben Affleck, who tells tales that make Smith sound like a choir boy.
On stage at Carnegie Hall, he spoke of being overruled by Bruce Willis on the set of A Couple of Dicks ("When Bruce talks, you listen…especially when you're making a movie with a cop or a gun in it"), the late George Carlin's dream role ("I wanna play a clergyman who strangles six children — I think I can pull that off"), and his legacy ("Longevity kills specialness: If I'd made Clerks, rode that for five years, then disappeared, they'd have built monuments to me"). Provided you don't mind torrents of foul language, sex described in pornographic detail, and arcane pop-culture references — he even dropped a Doug Henning joke last night — it's a good time had by all.
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